Sulawesi - GIS

A person is considered poor if and only if his or her expenditure level is below defined poverty line. The poverty line used is basically a minimum standard income required to fulfill his or her basic necessity of both food and non-food. The adequate minimum standard of food used is 2100 kcal energy. The minimum needs for non-food consist of a number of essential items such as housing, clothing, healthcare, education, and transportation, and other commodities.

Poverty is the state of being without, often associated with need, hardship and lack of resources across a wide range of circumstances. For some, poverty is a subjective and comparative term; for others, it is moral and evaluative; and for others, scientifically established. The principal uses of the term include:

• Descriptions of material need, including deprivation of essential goods and services, multiple deprivation, and patterns of deprivation over time.
• Economic circumstances, describing a lack of wealth (usually understood as capital, money, material goods, or resources, especially natural resources). The meaning of "sufficient" varies widely across the different political and economic parts of the world. In the European Union, poverty is also described in terms of "economic distance", or inequality.
• Social relationships, including social exclusion, dependency, and the ability to live what is understood in a society as a "normal" life: for instance, to be capable of raising a healthy family, and especially educating children and participating in society.

A person living in the condition of poverty is said to be poor or impoverished.

For years, scholars have debated alternative conceptions of poverty. We outline three alternatives in this section:

• The absolute approach: poverty is having less than an objectively defined absolute minimum.
• The relative approach: poverty is having less than others in society.
• The subjective approach: poverty is feeling you do not have enough to get along.

Absolute Poverty

The idea that individuals are poor if they have insufficient income to purchase some objective minimum bundle of goods has a long history. In 1901, Rowntree classified families as poor if their total earnings are insufficient to obtain the minimum necessities for the maintenance of merely physical efficiency. This idea underlies both the United States official poverty lines, which are derived from recommended minimum adequate food budgets,14 and the Market Basket Measures recently proposed by Human Resources Development Canada. An appeal of such measures is that they represent a fixed benchmark against which progress can be measured over time. A major disadvantage is that it is extremely difficult to choose an objectively defined .minimum set of necessities, and that this minimum standard will necessarily change over time. For instance, indoor plumbing and electricity would now be regarded as “necessities” in Canada, but this is not necessarily true in other countries, nor was it true in Canada earlier in the century.

Relative Poverty

A relative conception of poverty defines individuals as poor if they have significantly less income than others around them. This perspective also has a very long history: Adam Smith wrote more than 200 years ago: “Under necessaries”, therefore, I comprehend not only those things which nature, but those things which the established rules of decency have rendered necessary to the lowest rank of people. Most typically, relative measures of poverty define poor individuals as having less than some percentage (40% or 50%) of median equivalent income. A major advantage of this approach is its simplicity and transparency. It requires no decisions about what constitutes a minimum necessary basket.

Subjective Poverty

The subjective approach to defining poverty is more popular in Europe than in North America. This approach argues that individuals are poor when they feel they do not have enough to get along. Proponents argue that the best way to assess how much income people need to “make ends meet” is to ask them. Thus, subjective poverty lines are constructed from surveys that ask questions such as: Living where you do now and meeting the expenses you consider necessary, what would be the very smallest income you and your family would need to make ends meet? Of course, answers to this question increase with the respondents income, and estimates of subjective poverty lines take this phenomenon into account.

source:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poor

JICA, “Poverty Profile Executive Summary Republic of Indonesia”, Japan Bank for International Cooperation, February 2001

Phipps, Shelley , “The Impact of Poverty on Health:a scan of research literature”, Canada: CIHI, 2003

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 05, 2005 at 4:05 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.